People considering him a genius as opposed to a narcissist who accidentally got rich likely fuels his need to drop nuggets of "wisdom" to the peasants like this.
His essays are usually a big pile of “focus on the important things and add value or whatever”-type platitudes. It’s funny that each one has been proofread and revised based on comments from the Who-is-Who in SV, a typical Emperor and His New Clothes situation.
To be fair though, 99% of wisdom books from successful people are like this.
Calling it platitudes is harsh. The Airbnb founders have repeatedly said that their company was going no where but for Paul Graham's mentorship and the series of advice he gave them, amidst an economy in dire recession.
And btw, before YC, the whos-who of SV were a closed-knit, exclusive group. You underestimate the very radical nature of YC when they started in 2004.
I think that is an important fact to know considering the confusion in this thread.
There are people commenting that pg surely can't be a genius because this or that he engages in isn't ethical (to them).
But that's the thing, the IQ says absolutely nothing about ones ethical responsibility or the amount of empathy one has.
It is purely measuring "logical thinking ability". Things like "continue this sequence", "recognize a pattern", etc.
I also often see this dangerous assumption that ones political opponents or everyone with a different opinion than the one which seems most rational to ones own must be "stupid". In reality, the problem is that we focus on something as (arguably) unimportant as the IQ, which measures only something very narrow.
Another misconception about IQ is that those who are more poor or have less favourable job positions must have a lower IQ. To give just one counter example to that, very often, people who have some sort of handicap (ASD, ADHD, etc.) are also "gifted", have a high IQ, are good when it comes to logical thinking. But their handicaps still make their lives more difficult in general, so they face more adversity than someone who is "normal".
Sorry that i wrote a wall of text, was just thinking out loud.
In my personal opinion, the IQ is already a little dangerous, because it assigns a "value" to a human life, but that is an entirely different discussion.
I'm no particular fan of pg and for sure I'm not all that knowledgeable when it comes to VC, but it is my understanding that at the very early stages of investment pitch-decks are pretty much useless, it surprised me when I saw all those people attacking pg for this particular issue.
